Future Gazer
by GenesisArclite
Summary: Two hundred years after the War of Transgression, Yeul has a series of visions depicting a mysterious woman. Witnessing these visions, Caius becomes enamored with her... a woman who has not been born yet, and is destined to become his bane.


_**Future Gazer**_

"You wandered off again, didn't you?"

The Guardian in question halted in the entrance to the practical but lovingly-decorated hut sitting in the center of the settlement. It was nearing nightfall, the sky turning a bronze hue touched with wine reds, the breeze slow, soft, and warm. He stood a moment longer to let that breeze whisk past him, bringing with it the fresh scent of grass, trees, wet soil, and chocobos – not entirely unpleasant smells.

Three hundred years, and he hadn't grown tired of those scents yet.

"My apologies." Caius stepped inside proper and dropped the blind behind him, cutting off the breeze but not the smells. "I was busy with a hunting–"

His charge's soft laugh cut him off. She was genuinely amused. "No need to apologize, Caius. I know you would never truly abandon your duties. Even out on the plains, you still keep a close eye on me. Have I ever had need to be afraid across these lifetimes?"

He quickly clamped down on the reflexive cringe of discomfort that reminder of her endless cycle of life and death always brought. In three hundred years, ever since the end of the civil war, she had died before him around twenty times, sometimes living to the age of seventeen, sometimes only fourteen or fifteen. This girl before him was sixteen – how much longer did she have before she, too, perished?

But he smiled for her sake. "No. I suppose not."

The girl was a bit more slender than the other forms she'd taken and had cropped her bluish hair shorter as well. Now she sat cross-legged on the floor with her delicate fingers arranging beads in different patterns on a sheet of cloth. He sat beside her to watch for a moment. At least it kept her mind off her impending vision of death, he hoped.

But he couldn't keep his mouth shut forever. "Any more visions?" he asked.

She shook her head. "None since you left."

"And yourself?"

"Prepared, just as you left it." Yeul smiled and patted his forearm. "You shouldn't worry so much. Everything is fine."

"It is my job to worry about you. Literally. It's in the job description."

"Caius, Caius," she said, "you would make a wonderful, if somewhat annoying, parent."

He tried to picture that. Relinquishing his Guardian duties and settling down with a woman in the village to raise a family? No, that was one thing beyond his reach. As an immortal, he would only outlive anyone he crossed paths with.

They sat quietly for some time. He was content to watch her work, frowning in concentration, though after a while he grew restless and quietly adjourned to his antechamber. Only when he had closed the door and lowered the blind did he carefully remove his form-fitting armor, giving his skin the chance to feel the air instead of the confines of the suit. It was a simple matter – a wave of the hand to collapse it into chaos – and soon it was done and he was lying on his stomach on the pile of sheets he called his "bed".

Well, it was better than the dirt.

He dug under the sheets some before yanking two of them up to cover himself to mid-back, then bunched the others together for better comfort. Only then did he curl up and, exhausted from the day's events of hunting and patrolling, finally fall asleep.

He wasn't sure how long he'd slept, but when he awoke again at a quiet sound, it was night and the crickets were chirping loudly just outside the hut's wall. Annoyed, he fought the temptation to bury himself even deeper into the covers, thinking the sound had been some wild animal. It was when the sound came again, louder and clearer, that he recognized it and sat up. The night was hot and the air humid, making him sweat even more profusely than he had been earlier. The thought of putting his armor back on over it disgusted him, but it would be inappropriate to do otherwise, so he reluctantly returned it to its place on his body before going back into the central lobby.

"Yeul…?" he began.

But the girl was smiling at him, even if it was a pained smile. "Not yet, don't worry. Just a vision."

He couldn't relax. "It sounds rather…"

When he trailed off, she moved closer to him, reaching out to touch him. "A spasm. Nothing worse than I am used to." When her fingertips met his arm, his mind immediately flooded with a thousand images; she collapsed on her knees in obvious relief and rubbed her temples.

As Caius started to move toward her, noting the unfolding vision as he did, his somewhat obsessive and protective nature nagging him to help her up, he almost ignored it completely. After all, he could merely look at any of the visions later, when it was more convenient. He had seen so many that soon they all kind of blurred together. Many of them built upon previous ones as more details came to light. Many became even fuzzier as the timeline continued to change, sometimes canceling previous timelines out, sometimes birthing a new one, sometimes spitting out a plethora of chaotic ones that made no sense to any viewer – even Yeul was often befuddled by them.

This time, however, he hesitated.

The images were full of static, indicating they were the earliest images of this future she had yet seen, interspersed with bursts of light and shadow. There were people, living in a world he'd never seen before – a massive, phantasmagorical world with glittering buildings reaching into the heavens and white crystal trees and enormous flowers and great mechanical beasts. Flashes of people – a dark-skinned man with a tiny chocobo chick, a tall blond fighting against dangerous-looking men, a girl with reddish hair staring at a sky bursting with color and light – appeared one by one.

And in the midst of it all was a woman, a bit thin and pale for his tastes but quite strong, fast enough to outmaneuver a great mechanical beast resembling a scorpion, agile enough to dodge the fierce attacks of… Anima, Oerba's patron fal'Cie?

Caius promptly forgot about Yeul for the first time in his life and stared at that woman. She kept turning up, over and over, all the images full of static, but soon he began to think that in spite of belonging to a standard different from his people, she was actually quite beautiful, in form, movement, and prowess.

"What is this?" he said, fixated on the images.

Yeul stayed on her knees, apparently comfortable that way. "Some three, perhaps four hundred years in the future," she replied. "I… cannot tell you much from what I see, but I believe it is the beginning of some sort of war that will take place."

Caius wasn't really paying attention. "And who is _she_?"

"She appears to have been swept up in this war against her will, but her journey does not end here. It goes on much further to–" Pause. "Caius, what do you think you're up to?"

He didn't respond.

"Caius, I'm speaking to you."

"Hmm?" He turned his head slightly toward the girl. "What is it?"

She sighed. "Considering how young she looks and how far away this future is, she will not be born for some time."

Now he looked at her. "Yeul, be reasonable. I was merely curious."

"Are you certain?"

He looked her in the eye, making sure he had a very don't-start-that-with-me-young-lady expression on his face when he did. "I am certain," he said. "I know my limits. Wisdom _does_ come with age, after all."

She smiled. "Alright, old man."

The so-not-amused expression lingered, but he decided to accept a stalemate this time rather than keep them both from getting the sleep they needed. Once he was certain she was going to and staying asleep, he crawled back to is pile of sheets, stripped off his armor, and fell so deep asleep that he woke the next morning with a horrible backache.

The vision returned as a surreal dream the following night, including the woman. Caius woke up the next morning and shamefully buried his face in the sheets.

_Stop that. Three centuries, Ballad, perhaps even four. Too long._

For several months after that, the same vision returned sporadically, usually not including any new information, just pieces shifted around and presented in different ways. Eventually, he spotted another woman, one with bronze skin, dark hair, and a muscular build. Her outfit told him she belonged to Oerba, but that village-nation had been decimated a century prior by the War of Transgression.

Almost eight months later, a fresh vision came at last.

Yeul said of it, "It shows the war in more detail. There – the setting. I believe it is Cocoon, and they are attempting to destroy it. Their Focus is to destroy Cocoon, which is their home. They do not wish to, and so they seek a way to stop it. There seems to be a– Caius, are you paying attention?"

He had been. Well, sort of. "What?"

"Caius, really."

"I am listening, Yeul, don't worry. I am merely trying–"

"Caius!"

A bit taken aback at this outburst, he blinked at her. "What am I doing that is so terrible?"

Her comparatively tiny, delicate hand lay atop his. "It is no use pining for a woman who has not yet been born and will not be for some hundreds of years."

Hiding his shame at being found out with practiced ease, he shook his head. "Why not? Perhaps I cannot be with anyone, but I will live to see her. It may be a long time yet, but it is not a time out of reach."

To his surprise, Yeul laughed at him. "Caius, you are so hardheaded."

He tried to look innocent. "Am I?"

"Do you dream of her?"

He snorted softly. "Whenever the visions are fresh, I dream of every element of them. Having one person or more in it does not constitute 'dreaming' of him or her. She is simply there, an element of the vision that happens to be–" Noticing her unconvinced expression, he stopped. "Alright. My dreams frequently include her more than any other element, but I suspect it is because of her importance."

"Yes, she is important, but that isn't the point."

"Then what is?"

"Caius, you will outlive her. Even if somehow you did cross paths, it could never last. You would either be thrown into violent conflict with her or need to part ways because of your immortality, and that's assuming you meet on neutral terms, or at all. If you don't meet, nothing happens, and you will hold feelings for a person you can never be with regardless."

Suddenly bitter, Caius turned away. "I find her attractive."

"And what if, someday, you met her, and it isn't what you want?"

He frowned. "Have you had a vision about her that you did not tell me about, Yeul?"

She hesitated too long for the answer to be anything but positive. "Caius, please understand. There is far more at stake than you or me. I understand your need, your desire, for a companion and how the lack of one – and the understanding that she is beyond your reach – is embittering."

He faced her and spoke before she could go on. "I _am_ stubborn."

Pause. "But–"

"I know I could be hurt, but I am willing to try."

Yeul half-smiled at him, washing some of the pent-up seriousness. "Look at you, enamored with a woman you've never met because she hasn't been born yet, simply because you saw her in my visions and keep seeing her in your dreams. It's so tragic it's… it's–" Now she was fighting back a smile that completely baffled him. "Well, only time will tell. Even I don't know the whole story."

Caius stared at her, still confused. "Am I missing something?"

She laughed a little before forcing it back. "Yes."

The Guardian folded his arms. "I fail to see what is so amusing about all this."

She finally stopped looked amused. "It doesn't matter."

He gazed at her a bit longer, trying to decide what else to say or do. Finally, he conceded and turned to the entrance of the hut. "If you need me, I will be out on the plains for a while. I will be back shortly." With that, he left to clear his head.

It was midday, meaning the Pulsian sun blazed down on his shoulders while grass and shale cracked underfoot. He walked alone, not at all unusual for him, heading across the plains toward the cliff that overlooked a beautiful vista of mountains and waterfalls off into the distance. He then tried to think about something other than the pink-haired woman with her sharp tongue and reckless tenacity. Had he lived too long, so long that he was just that lonely? But three hundred and some-odd years wasn't all that long, or was it? He wasn't sure anymore.

Staring across the vista, he grunted, then sat down heavily in the grass. From here, he heard the sound of the waters of the marsh running past to tumble down the cliff, where it splashed and sparkled far below in the basin of rainbows and sunshine. There was a lagoon down there, which he had never ventured down into, surrounded by green hills. Farther away toward the horizon, the mountains stood under the wide blue sky, and almost to the horizon itself, the dull brown sphere of Cocoon with a sizable chunk of it torn out from the War of Transgression hung in the air. It was peaceful and beautiful, and if he closed his eyes and relaxed, the sun could put him to sleep.

That was what he did, quietly stretching out on his back with his eyes closed, exhaling the images in his head, trying not to think at all.

* * *

Eleven hundred years later, Caius was the one of three humans in a world devastated by the fall of Cocoon two hundred years earlier. By then, he'd grown bitter, resentful, resolving to end Yeul's cycle of rebirth in the only way he knew how: the end of time itself. He had not thought of the pink-haired woman for some years now, though once in a while she crept into his dreams.

_A one-track mind had its consequences._

When he tore open a portal to Valhalla, the parallel universe of no time, life, or death, he stumbled onto a crystal-laden beach that stretched on for miles beside a bioluminescent sea washing up and down the sand eternally. The stone-faced buildings covering every inch of ground besides the beach were cold and silent and dark. He stood there for a bit before remembering his mission to kill the overseer of time and chaos herself and immediately headed into the city.

Or, started to, and stopped.

Farther down the beach was a slender figure in red and white clothes and knee-high brown boots. She didn't see him as he stood in the shadows and she only glanced about for the briefest of seconds before walking into the city. Caius hesitated as her hair caught the ambient light of the strange land.

_Her hair was pink._

Caius suddenly felt as though someone had wrapped their fingers around his heart and begun to squeeze very, very hard. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't _think_. Gasping softly, he stepped back to lean against the wall, one hand coming to his chest, becoming a fist. How long he had willingly forgotten all about her and tried to let go of her memory. Faced with the countless deaths of Yeuls, he had done so, shedding his softer side for the razor blade of a warrior's heart.

And now his long-buried unrequited love for a woman he had only ever seen in visions came flaring up like a forgotten wound.

Sliding to the sand with his back still to the wall, he buried his face in both hands.

* * *

_I think everyone knows by now that I'm a shipper for these two warriors. And no, this was not inspired by "A New Hope", even though it resembles the Luke-sees-Leia's-hologram-and-loves-her-instantly scene. Maybe it was subconscious. This was an entry for a contest on deviantArt as well. I hope you've enjoyed it, and do let me know what you think!_


End file.
